Ukrainian soldiers check a bus on a road near Sloviansk

MOSCOW, June 02. /ITAR-TASS/. Another 56 refugees from the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk regional city of Sloviansk, including parents and their children, fled by foot from Donetsk Region to southern Russia’s Rostov Region overnight to Monday, Russian Presidential Children’s Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov said in his Twitter microblog.

“Overnight to Monday, another 30 children and 26 adults went by foot from Donetsk Region to Rostov Region. All of them are accommodated for rest and recuperation courses. Fourteen children will go by transit to the city of Stavropol (southern Russia). We keep receiving refugees. All services are ready for this,” Astakhov said.

Ukraine border guards refuse to let bus with children cross the border

Overnight to Saturday, May 31, Ukrainian border guards did not permit a bus from the city of Sloviansk with 38 refugees, including 21 children aged from two months to 12 years, to go to Rostov Region. Russian border guards helped them to cross the border by foot, official from the Rostov-on-Don information policy department Alexander Titov told ITAR-TASS.

The incident has occurred at a border checkpoint between southern Russia’s Donetsk and Ukraine’s Izvarino. Along with children, the bus was also carrying 17 women. Titov said that refugees had been accommodated at holiday home Donetsky in the Rostov regional town of Donetsk where they had spent the night. The city's governor then instructed to assign two comfortable buses to them to go to the Black Sea resort city of Yevpatoria escorted by road police.

Around 150 children from the city of Sloviansk came to the Russian Republic of Crimea on May 30 from south-eastern Ukrainian regions where Kiev authorities are carrying out a punitive operation.